Parkette Price to get another shot at World's

The local gymnast did well at weekend's U.S. Gymnastics Championships and will compete at selection camp.

August 20, 2013|Special to The Morning Call

Donna Strauss isn't sure that any other current American gymnast could have gotten so much out of so little time as Elizabeth Price did leading up to the P&G U.S. Gymnastics Championships.

With only nine days of practice after three months of down time because of an injury, Price, a 17-year-old Parkettes gymnast from Coopersburg, was able to get two events ready for the biggest national meet of the year.

The two-time World Cup champion did enough with her vault and uneven bars routines Thursday and Saturday nights in Hartford, Conn., to earn a petition to a selection camp at which the U.S. team for the 2013 World Gymnastics Championships will be determined.

Price was sidelined from January to April with a hip injury, returned briefly, then suffered an injury to the other hip and went back on the injured list for another three months.

Only her dogged persistence to continue conditioning and her ability to pick up almost where she left off when she finally did get back into event training enabled her to get ready for the national meet.

But the results Price got in Hartford are history; on Monday, she was back in the Parkettes National Training Center in Allentown with a new goal in sight — and precious little time to fully prepare for it.

She will leave for Huntsville, Texas, on Sept. 12, and, on Sept. 14, a group of about a dozen girls will compete before no large audience and no television cameras, but in a meet that will be every bit as important as the U.S. Championships.

After that Sept. 14 "meet," the powers that be in American gymnastics, headed by national women's coach Marta Karolyi, will name four girls to the team that competes at the World Championships beginning Sept. 30 in Antwerp, Belgium.

What makes the task more daunting for Price is that several of the berths on the U.S. team may already be locked in.

McKayla Maroney and Kyla Ross, members of the team that won the gold medal at the London Summer Olympics in 2012 (a team Price just missed being named to), had strong showings in Hartford. If both are healthy next month, it will be difficult to keep them off.

Simone Biles won the all-around national championship in Hartford, and Strauss said that was the most consistent effort she had ever seen from the Spring, Texas, resident. She didn't win any individual event, but was second in all four.

There is no doubt Price has the skills and the talent to contend for one of the four spots on the team, but both she and Strauss know a lot will depend on how well the stepped-up training goes in the next few weeks.

"Her tumbling [on floor exercise] looks really good," Strauss said. "She warmed up with her group Saturday night in Hartford, and she was getting oohs and aahs from the crowd. Even though she didn't complete her routine, it was good for her to get all her passes in."

Floor exercise was the last event Price added to her training regimen during her recent comeback. In fact, she did some tumbling in Hartford that she had done only once in her home gym prior to the national meet.

After having a bad break on the uneven bars in Thursday's first round at the P&G meet, Price came back on Saturday night and had a flawless routine in which she improved her Thursday score by 2.55 points. And it's likely that her ability to turn Thursday's negative into Saturday's positive was a decisive factor in her petition effort.

Price, asked to rate her U.S. Championships showing on a scale of one to 10, hardly hesitated before saying, "Nine." That was pretty evident, too, the way she and her coaches smiled after the bars routine.

She will be working to put the extremely difficult Amanar vault — a Yurchenko 21/2 — back into competition shape. She nearly had a balance-beam routine ready for Hartford, so she should be able to put the finishing touches on it now, and she'll work hard on the entire floor routine as well.

"At least she gets the opportunity to train these next few weeks," Strauss said. "We'll see how strong-minded she is and how hard she works. We're going to give it every shot we have."

Price said she was pretty confident that she could get petitioned to the World's selection camp and that she can be ready to give it her best shot Sept. 14.

"Every training camp puts a lot of pressure on you," she said, "but this won't be as long as the camp last year [prior to the Olympic Games]. I'm looking forward to it."

Price was not the only Parkette at the P&G meet; Christina Desiderio and Molly Frack were in the Junior Division for women, and former Parkette Sean Senters, who is at Stanford University, was in the Senior Men's Division.

"We were very happy with them," Strauss said of Desiderio and Frack, who were in their first national championship meet. "They had good attitudes and came across confident-looking and happy. They had some of their best performances of the season."